


i am quicksand / lick me from your hand

by propergoffic



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: (as written by an asexual whoops), Angst, Drug Use, F/F, Haunting, Illness, Masturbation, Porn Without Plot, auto-erotic asphyxiation, cogito ergot sum, crywanking, hallucination, harrow's an idiot, is the horn of a hallucination a real horn?, peak sweaty hours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:33:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26681473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: Was this really a good idea?"I said to myself, what would Griddle do?"And you came up with 'lock the door, get so high you could eat a star, and think really really hard about the hottest girl in the whole-ass galaxy?' I'm so proud.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 75





	i am quicksand / lick me from your hand

**Author's Note:**

> I drafted this before I'd read Harrow the Ninth. I like to think I wasn't THAT far off in my guess that Harrow would do something stupid, poisoned by grief. Within an astronomical unit, at least.
> 
> Title is from Project Pitchfork's 'Timekiller.' It was almost Bertine Zetlitz, but the grim overtook me.
> 
> Unbeta'd, for which I can only apologise. My usual hasn't read the books yet, and being new to the fandom I've no-one else to ask.

Here is a fact about lyctors: they are the loneliest people in the universe.

Here is another fact about lyctors: their bodies can sustain a staggering amount of anything the universe happens to throw at them.

Here is a fact about Harrowhark: she is not a gifted alchemist, but she is a quick study.

Cultivating moulds and fungus looks normal. Like a pastime. It's a relief for the others to see her do something other than train or study or quietly dissociate when she's not being spoken to, and so she's left to it.

And because she doesn't quite know what she's doing, and because she's relying on enhanced physiology to cope with this at all, she blends the whole lot together, reduces it down to a tincture, and knocks the whole thing back in one. Something in her says she should pound the glass down, so she does, and it obliges her by not shattering.

Time passes.

* * *

_Was this really a good idea?_

"I said to myself, what would Griddle do?"

_And you came up with 'lock the door, get so high you could eat a star, and think really really hard about the hottest girl in the whole-ass galaxy?' I'm so proud._

"I meant 'get sad then do something stupid and base that would probably work if I didn't try to stop it working. And I'm only not telling you to shut up because I didn't bring you back to tell you to shut up."

_You didn't bring me back. I'm just a hallucination, charnel babe. Just a fever dream._

_How the fuck do I know that?_

"You know because I know. Because you're my hallucination. Mine. And you will remember because I will remember for you. I have an eidetic memory, Nav. Trained and drilled from the moment I learned my own name, because that's how you make an infant into a genius. And I can do this – I can endure this – forever if it means I get to keep you. If you're dead then I will remember you, always, and I will bring you back inside my head over and over again before I let you go completely."

Harrow is uncomfortably aware that she's a) rambling inanely and b) sweating buckets. Somewhere out there, in a cold and unforgiving universe that isn't this one any more, she knows she's riding out an ingestion of psychedelic toxins that would kill an ordinary mortal in minutes.

But in this universe, Gideon's hand is on her forehead. And what's reality compared to this?

_Stupid sexy necromancer._

"I can't believe you just said that."

_I can't fucking believe it either._

"I'd better not have made you say that."

_And you said I never let us have a moment. I just SAY this dumb shit with my actual mouth. You have to lie here and think about if your thought is a real thought and if your dream is a real dream and since YOU insist on thinking it I have to think it. You are such a fucking nerd, Harrowhark._

"You live on through me. You are literally part of me. So I think you'll find it is you, Griddle, who are the nerd."

_All I wanted, at the end – and you can take this **any way you like** – was to be a part of you._

"Say that again."

_My mistress of the starless night. My dread commander. My midnight queen. I will say it as many times as you have tiny stupid bones, even those little ones in your reverend ears, as many times as you need and as many times as it takes for you to listen. I will do whatever it takes to make you take the hint. This is all I wanted, at the end._

It becomes difficult to concentrate on this revelation, because Harrow's abruptly rolled onto her side and one of Gideon's heavy calloused paws is at her throat, tracing the arc of her clavicle back and forth, and one is on her hip and cradling her pelvic girdle, and she must have whimpered because her head's turned around and the hand is cupping her jaw now and Gideon's kissing her until she can hardly breathe.

_Whatever it takes._

"Griddle – "

Gideon's thumb presses into the meat below her jawbone. Her objection dies, strangled, pushed back down the taut line of her throat under Gideon's thumb, and she wriggles back into the hollow of Gideon's body, curling up like she's carrying the sun on her shoulders.

_I didn't know you were into choking. Figures you'd go for the near death experience. Hey – are you only up for this now because I'm –_

"Shut up. I take it back. Gideon Nav Talking Time is cancelled."

Harrow takes those clumsy longswordswoman hands and guides them, because no matter if Griddle's willing or not she still has to be dragged every inch of the way but the last to do things right. One hand up her throat, nestling against the hinges of her jaw. One hand down, swirling around the hollow of her hips, and further.

Gideon's hands are warm, not cold. They're rough, not slender and knobbly. They're bigger than hers, and two of her fingers are wide as three of Harrowhark's narrow little digits. But the saving grace of all this is that Gideon has read the kind of filth with which the Reverend Daughter would never pollute her mind, which means somewhere in Gideon's muscle memory there is something that knows what the hell it's doing, which is presumably why Harrow yelps so loud Gideon has to choke her again the moment those sweat-soaked fingers slip inside her.

Harrow has never been touched like this. She has never, barring accidents and an exploratory twenty minutes when she was fifteen and wondering about muscle reconstruction, touched herself like this. It's crude and it's obscene and it's premortem biological in a way she cannot be having with at all and yet, with so much of her self-control preoccupied with little things like not dying, she can let herself slide, slide, slide. It's autonomic. Her body moves itself. It's immersive and exhausting as the fever is, and now Harrow is finding it harder and harder to pay attention, her hips bucking back and forth of their own volition. She's not doing this. Griddle's doing this to her. For her. With her. Whatever. She flexes, aware of a cramp on the edge of her consciousness, and that feels strange and soft and she's shivering, with a core temperature running high above human-norm, why is she **shivering**?

Gasping, writhing, fighting for breath, these things are all perfectly normal for someone who's made a battlefield of their own body and is currently winning. There's a hand on her throat and she's clawing, clawing, lips and teeth and knuckles worrying together. They're tottering back and forth on the edge of death and it's here, on the edge of death, that Harrow belongs, walking a line that gets narrower and narrower and narrower as it leads them into light.

When it's over, when Harrow has thrashed to an untidy climax, she's aware dimly that her fever must have broken, and she'll wake up alone and sticky, her paint smudged and smothered with tear tracks.

 _The things we do for love_ , says a voice inside her head, and Harrow isn't completely sure it isn't hers.


End file.
